Of cats and dogs

Limoges and Béarn (7)

In July 1274 William de Valence, Edward I’s Lusigan half-uncle, laid siege to Aixe castle in the Limousin with an army of Englishmen and French militia. The castle was defended by the soldiers of the Viscomtesse Marguerite of Limoges, also cooped up inside.

The ruins of Aixe castle

Valence brought an engineer, named Civry, who devised an interesting siege engine. This thing lobbed balls of burning sulphur, a weapon apparently not used again by the English until the siege of Brechin in Scotland in 1303. For nine days Civry’s invention pounded the walls, while the defenders hurled bits of timber and broken furniture down on the besiegers. Valence apparently kept his own men in reserve and let the militia do all the rough stuff: it was their fight, after all.

The siege ended abruptly on 24 July, when a herald from Paris ordered both parties to cease hostilities. Philippe le Hardi, king of France, had been slow to deal with the private war in Limoges, but now he took control of the affair. He ordered the king of England not to receive any more oaths of fealty from Limoges, not to block the justice of the Viscomtesse, not to protect the bourgeois and not to maintain a bailiff in the city.

To add insult to injury, the Candlemas parliament of 1275 ordered Edward to pay war damages amounting to 22, 613 livres tournois. It is difficult to figure out how much this was worth in English currency, but in the fifteenth century one English pound sterling was worth 8.5 times as much as the livres tournois. This gives a ballpark figure of £2600 Edward was required to pay - hefty enough, given that the average income of an English baron in this era was about £300 per annum.

On top of that was the political embarrassment. Edward had tried to act on principle in Limoges, and ended up being slapped with a bill for war damages. Philippe had not exactly been helpful, and the chronicler of Limoges remarked on the peculiar relationship of the two kings; there was, he said, a ‘cat-and-dog love between them’:

“Hic amor dici potest amor cati et canis.”

To add to Edward’s woes, Gaston de Béarn was still carping away in the background. Never one to accept defeat, Gaston had appealed to the French parlement against Edward, and appeared in person before Philip. Here he denounced the English king as a traitor, a liar and an unfair judge, and challenged him to single combat. In a final flourish, he literally threw down his gauntlet.

Gaston had really gone too far this time. There were certain rules to this game, and challenging one’s feudal overlord to a duel was not one of them.